This piece is on my Tears of the Healer CD. For lack of a better label, I've characterized it as "country folk." It has a long history. I composed the acoustic 12-string part back in about 1977, but for years and years, I could never think of a melody that sounded right with it. Fast forward a few decades or so and I decided to give Band in a Box's ability to generate solos a try -- see if it came up with anything interesting. Well, there were none generated that appealed to me per se, but on one occasion, BiaB limited its melody to a pentatonic scale, and that's when it hit me. Try writing the melody in pentatonic. Bingo! I came up with the entire melody in less than an hour. I decided that, being pentatonic and all, it was crying out for a harmonica part, so that's what I gave it.

The 12-string guitar actually isn't. It's my Fender Stratocaster running through my Roland GR-33 Guitar Synthesizer. That GR-33's 12-string patch nails it. The GR-33 was slaved to my DAW so I could import the MIDI file and 12-string voice into the DAW. The harmonica's part is 100% MIDI; it's voice was courtesy of my Roland JV-1010 synth. To get it to sound as natural as I could required that I edit the MIDI events, which gives one total control over the MIDI output. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. All other instruments are MIDI and generated by BiaB. Their voices were courtesy of my Roland JV-1010 synth module.

https://soundcloud.com/michaelmcbroom/thankful-for-what-i-have

If you're interested in more of the album, you'll find a link for it at the bottom right of the page.

Micheal, very pretty song! Perfect title for the feel of the song! You did a great job! As a side note, I would love to hear what a French horn would sound like in this ((I'm thinking Dan Fogleberg - Leader of the band type sound) but that's just me. Even so, it's great! Thanks, Torrey

You mean, french horn instead of harmonica? Hrm... I love the sound of the french horn, but I wonder if it might overpower things a bit.

I've recently located the Cakewalk .wrk files for my composition projects. Unfortunately, when I load them up in Sonar, all I get is MIDI using the pretty awful MS Wavetable Synth. Still, I have a rhythm track to try the melody out with. Well, the french horn using this setup is indeed overpowering. Woodwinds, like clarinet, oboe, or flute, aren't too bad, though. I tried a bunch of different voices. Rhodes piano and vibes aren't bad. But still, I like harmonica the best.

Here's one of my tunes at Soundcloud where I made extensive use of the french horn. Horn ensemble even. No BiaB tracks, though, so I probably shouldn't even be mentioning it here. But I am mentioning it to show how I have handled horns in other situations.

https://soundcloud.com/michaelmcbroom/cominghome

Hey Torrey, I just listened to a few of your tunes over at Soundcloud. Wow. Yours is some of the best stuff I've heard over there. I would love to find out how you get so much punch and volume out of your bass and drums. I maxed out the levels on my recordings and they still just sounded *bluh*. And as a result, some of my recordings just don't have the attack that I was after.

Thanks Micheal, on the mastering question, if you are using a daw like studio one like I do, I would put a final eq, compression and a limiter with the input gain on the limter set at about 2 in the master stereo track and make sure the limiter is last in the chain (some of the presets work fine for me) I also like to send my biab tracks seperatly to my daw and apply individual eqand compression on these tracks. On the French horn remarks I was thinking about using in places not as the dominant instrument. Thanks, Torrey

Thanks for the response, Torrey. I have a copy of the free version of Studio One 3, and I've played around with it some. I like it because it is easier to use than Sonar.

I've been looking through a back-up drive I have for sound files and I've found some Cakewalk working files of my tunes. In fact, I've found the CW "bundles" which are the final mixdowns. I thought I'd find the individual audio tracks in the 'bun' files, but instead all they hold are the midi tracks and an audio file of the 'master.' Kinda disappointing. I think I've lost the individual audio files forever. Although I do recall making some backups of my hard drives to CD over the years. Still unpacking from our move, though, and I have no idea where they are. Problem with CW software though is the way it handles audio. It scatters snippets all over the place and trying to reassemble a file can become a daunting task.

Anyway, I'm gonna try loading the .wav file into Sonar -- or maybe Studio One -- and see if I can follow your advice. Maybe I can still improve the sound to the audio file as a whole.

I really like this. This could be the theme song for a movie or television show. Very well done

This has a score quality for me as well. Very pleasant music!! Love the melody! Take care. Greg

Thanks for the feedback, guys. Honestly, I'd never considered this tune to have any score quality to it. Your comments open my eyes a bit to other possibilities. I've always thought of it as being pretty much a straight-up country-folk-pop tune, to be honest. I have a few other tunes I've written that I have always felt had more of a film soundtrack quality to them, but I didn't use BiaB or RealBand in their production, so I won't be mentioning them here. They're up on my soundcloud site, though.